“Kat said you’re not having a goodbye party.”
“I don’t want one.”
“It’s not for you, Shoops, it’s for everyone else.”
“They’ll live.” The pergola beams striped her doughy face with shadow; I noticed a new looseness in her cheeks and neck, gray filaments woven through her frizzy hair.
“We’re talking Denny Kudelka,” she said.
I showed her Adam Valois’s private autopsy report. After so many years on the job, she’d seen enough not to react to the verdict of “possible homicide.” Then she read the tox screen and the corners of her mouth wilted.
She was seeing the same thing I’d seen. Remembering, as I’d remembered.
She got up and went inside. I heard her rummaging in boxes.
“You want help?” I called.
“Stay there.”
I finished my coffee, counted butterflies.
Reemerging with a green plastic document holder, she undid the Velcro and shook the Kudelka file, fist-thick, onto the table.
“All right, Edison,” she said. “Memory lane.”
Sunday, April 21, 2024, dawned cold and dull across the East Bay. In Oakland’s Jack London Square, the staff of the Dockside Bar and Grill were prepping for brunch service. A busser stood by the window, folding napkins and gazing out at the marina where two dozen small craft plashed.
Something was in the water.
It bobbed by the empty outermost slip: round, grayish. The size and color made the busser think it was a porpoise — you saw them now and then, swimming in the Inner Harbor channel — but it didn’t move like any living thing she’d seen, oscillating in a fan shape as though tethered to the pier.
Feet surfaced.
Over by the host stand, the front-of-house manager was reviewing table assignments. He heard the busser scream and came running. She couldn’t speak but pointed.
The front-of-house manager had spent high school summers working as a lifeguard. He ran outside, vaulted the marina gate, and sprinted down the dock, ready to initiate lifesaving measures.
The body floated in the classic drowner’s pose: face down, arms and legs dangling toward the seabed. It had gotten tangled in kelp and was naked, save a faded black T-shirt. The condition of the skin made lifesaving measures beside the point.
The front-of-house manager didn’t want to do nothing, though, so he stripped off his tie and shirt, got down on his stomach, and thrust his arm into the filthy, frigid water, trying to grab hold of the body or the kelp. He couldn’t reach. He stood up, dripping, and felt for his phone. He didn’t have it. He’d left it on the host stand.
The entire restaurant staff was pressed up to the rear windows, staring at him.
He motioned for them to call 911, tracing the numbers in the air.
Nobody moved a muscle. He realized he was writing backward.
A boat drew near: the occupant of the empty slip, returning from an early-morning fishing expedition.
The front-of-house manager shouted: Body in the water.
The fisherman laid off the throttle and leaned over the port side rail.
It was a body, all right.
He radioed the Coast Guard, who dispatched a Defender and alerted 911, who sent Oakland Fire and PD. Emergency vehicles began piling up in the parking turnaround, uniforms swarmed the plaza. A crowd built along the boardwalk, posting to social media (OMG this is really happening) till the cops kicked everyone out and threw up a line of yellow tape.
At 10:41 a.m., Oakland police officer Z. Hallstein #517 contacted the Alameda County Coroner’s Bureau to request removal of the body.
ACSO deputy coroner Lisa Shupfer took the call. She recorded the scant preliminary information, strapped on her vest, and scanned the squad room for a partner.
Edison, she said. We’re up.
The Coast Guard had fished the decedent out and laid him on the dock. After erecting privacy screens, Shupfer conferred with the cops and I thumbed on the camera.
Caucasian male, twenty to thirty years of age. No identification on his person.
We transported him to the bureau. He weighed in at 129 pounds.
Dr. Simon Park performed the autopsy on Wednesday morning, April 24. John Doe displayed signs of prolonged immersion: washerwoman hands, skin slippage at the soles of the feet, animal depredation. His lungs were full of pink froth. His hyoid bone was intact. No apparent injuries — no propeller slashes or gunshot wounds or stab wounds; no head trauma, no skull fracture, no broken bones whatsoever.
Park ruled the cause of death as drowning.
Manner of death remained pending.
A week went by without anybody claiming him. In an effort to reach family, Shupfer released limited information to the media.
The next morning a woman named Irene Kudelka phoned the bureau. Her son Denny had been missing since late March. She supplied photos and a description of scars, enabling Shupfer to tentatively identify the decedent as Dennis Kudelka, age twenty-six, a resident of Concord. Postmortem changes made positive identification impossible.
Bad shape.
Irene had the family dentist send over her son’s records.
ID confirmed.
Behind the scenes, a game of jurisdictional hot potato was taking place.
The missing persons report had been filed in Concord.
Inner Harbor belonged to the Coast Guard, except for select areas that fell to California Highway Patrol.
The body had been brought ashore in Oakland — but that said nothing about where it had actually gone into the water.
Bottom line: Nobody wanted the case, which reeked of despair. In the end it circled back to Concord PD and a detective named Alan Mendes.
Without a crime scene, without evidence of suicidal intent or violence, Shupfer ruled the only way she could, the same way I or any other competent coroner would.
Accident.
Irene Kudelka disagreed. She was adamant someone had harmed her son. For months she continued to call both our office and Concord PD. She and her husband, Fabian, went public with a reward. Six thousand dollars.
Chump change compared with the Valoises’ twenty-five but a far bigger chunk of the Kudelkas’ net worth. Numerous individuals attempted to claim the money, including a psychic, who revealed that Denny Kudelka was alive and well, living underground in a government bunker in preparation for a top-secret mission.
“I need more coffee,” Shupfer said and went inside.
A breeze tickled the paper smothering the patio table. I didn’t have to ask why she’d kept the file — printed it out and brought it home, packed it for transport to Idaho, a piece of her old life stuck into her fresh start like a burr. We all have a case, or cases, like that.
Deeper, perhaps, for Lisa Shupfer.
A drowned young man.
Her son, his lungs filling and refilling with fluid.
She reappeared, balancing two Peet’s cans on her laptop. “Help.”
I took the cans. She sat, opened the computer, typed, turned the screen toward me.
She’d logged into her personal inbox, rather than her work one, opening a thread from June 2024. The sender, jbrenner, had a military address. The subject heading was Your Inquiry.
Deputy Shupfer:
Here is the information you requested.
To trace the source of an object, you either invert the currents from a flow model or run the tracers with a negative force. The flow field is derived from a hydrodynamic model. These are often regional-based. There are some technical caveats: When tracing forward, you often include a random walk drift term; those are not reversible. Also, not all possible source locations are reachable. Please see the attached URLs.